Not a Sin
by Acerbitas
Summary: Despite Roy's attempts at looking presentable, Gracia could see panic written in every disordered piece of clothing. “You know I loved him. Loved him in ways I never should have.” His eyes were pleading, soulful, and full of ancient pain. RoyxHughesxGrac


"Okay," said Roy, blankly. A strange smile lingered on his face, a bit goofy, a bit sad. "Sounds great." He pushed his hand back into his pocket, then yanked it out again. It lingered for a moment, looking strangely out of place and exposed before Roy shoved it back in. Furtive, like there was something wrong with it and he wanted to push it away so nobody else could see. He didn't want Hughes to see, but though Roy was great at masks and deception, somehow Hughes was a completely different story.

"It will be fun!" Hughes insisted with both buoyancy and desperation. "You'll meet girls, find your love, dance! Come on, it's a great way to get out of this depressing little…little cave of yours. By the way, do you want some pink curtains?"

Shrugging, Hughes slipped his arm over Roy's shoulder, burying his forehead in the other man's black locks. "Pink curtains for the win." He waved his free hand toward the muggy window in what was supposed to be an inspiring motion.

With a jerk Roy let out a startled grunt. "I… don't think so." He stiffened as Hughes' hands innocently patting his arm. "Not a good idea." He was finding it very hard to keep his breathing steady.

"Doesn't go with the somber, morbid air, huh?" With a sigh, Hughes detangled himself and took several long strides towards the mirror. For the fifth time he straightened his tie and ran a comb through his hair. "Do I look okay? Do you think she'll like my suit? Do you think my pants might be a little too long?" His voice rose with every question, words strung together in a rabid semi-panic. Roy watched Hughes fingers twitch as they wound around his tie.

"You look great." Roy's voice was a mere whisper, but he made a pointed effort to sound more cheery as he continued. "I'm sure she'll like your pants. You look good in long pants and a tie." He forced his eyes to trail away from Hughes' angular face and neat wire glasses. "Your glasses look good."

"Eh?" Hughes fingered the glasses, pushing them up and down his nose experimentally. "Do you think she likes men in glasses? She seemed to like me…glasses? Good…bad…" He winked into the mirror but for some reason Roy thought this made him look remarkably foolish.

"Maybe you should just act normal." Roy shrugged and shifted his feet. "We're going to be late." The window barely let any light in, and what did emerge was fractured sunlight, broken by the grime.

Hughes tugged his jacket down and pushed his hands over a small wrinkle. "Hmm?" He glanced at his watch and made a startled 'harrumph!' sound. "Come on Roy, we're off!" Grasping Roy's arm momentarily, he raced out the door. Tugging at the insides of his pockets, he bounced on his heels as Roy meticulously locked the door. "Oh Roy, she's marvelous."

"Um hum." Roy dropped his keys inside his pocket, but for some reason he missed the soothing metal rubbing up against his palms. "Yep." The churning feeling in his stomach was creeping into other parts of his body.

"You don't believe me, do you?" His friend sighed melodramatically. "Well, Roy, my friend, you will, you will." He tugged a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose with grace that Roy hadn't known he had possessed. "I hope that wasn't too loud for her."

"Just be yourself," Roy repeated in a monotone, eyebrows arching. He didn't understand why this wasn't incredibly funny. In fact, it was gosh darn depressing.

"Okay, okay." The words were coming out a bit too fast again. "Right." Hughes' feet danced down the stairs, sharp pattering about twice as fast as Roy's leaden clomping. "Myself!"

"Yeah, yourself."

Roy started the car, eyes fixated on the road in front of him and mouth set. After awhile Hughes' excited chatter dwindled into an awkward silence. The car zoomed towards its destination, Roy's hands gripped tight to the steering wheel.

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"Just listen to me!" Gracia's normally placid voice was loud and frustrated. "Listen to me, you! You stupid, stubborn man!" She flung her purse on the kitchen table and pressed her hands over her eyes, fingers digging into her hair.

Hunching his shoulders, Roy stared at the door in front of him with longing. He swallowed, but his mouth was dry, and his lips were wretched. He felt like he was going to begin to hack, or wheeze. Or maybe even explode, which would solve a whole lot of his problems.

The brief spurt of anger was gone and she flopped back into her kitchen chair, her small sniffling sounds much more deafening than screams. "He's dead, Roy. And we've got to move on."

Roy walked towards the counter and filled a blue and white striped mug up with water, watching as a small stream flew off the side and onto the dish drainer. "You should get your faucet fixed," he said. "Soon it will leak worse."

Gracia let out a moan and shut her eyes like somehow that would make Roy well. "Say he's dead." She untangled her hands from her hair, but after that she didn't know where to put them.

There was a long silence as Roy stared into his cup without comprehension. He forgot to take a drink, and left it sitting neglected in the sink, forlorn. He ran his fingers over the countertop. "He's dead."

With a sudden motion he selected the cup, drinking because for a moment he could fill his mind with nothing but the arid taste of the water.

Gracia's sobs were mixed with gurgles of pained laughter.

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"Yes, yes," Hughes was saying. "Yes, I understand. …Uh huh." He shifted in his chair, shooting Gracia an exasperated look. The pencil between his teeth crunched quite ruthlessly. "Yes. No, Will. You—you have to look at the—don't touch the—"

Gracia could hear the sounds of near hysteria from the other end of the phone. "…Never mind. I'll come in." With a grimace he hung up the phone and shrugged uncomfortably. He couldn't look her in the eyes, it seemed. "The kid's sixteen, Gracia. Nobody who's sixteen should be placed on a murder case. Especially one where the woman was found decapitated."

Gracia smiled softly at him before getting up and moving towards the stairs. Her peach dress swayed with a sad rhythm, flowing around her ankles. "It's okay." Her voice was soft and gentle. "You need to go sort that out, dear. We'll go some other time."

Blinking blearily, he nearly drowned himself with the rest of his coffee. The cup made a dull thud against the wood, and Gracia could just hear the sound of a woman's body smacking against the pavement. She was sprawled on the street, long blonde hair a mess of dirt and mud. Her blood was congealed against the cobblestones, almost blended in, but somehow still so potent. Gracia felt herself shudder.

Her husband would stay up late at night, gruesome murder scenes spread out on their kitchen table. Murders, atrocities? They were like math problems. She could tell because he would merely sit there and dig into a bag of hard candy, nibbling the edges before shattering them beneath his teeth.

"Yes, we have time." With a wistful smile he rose, blue and white striped cup left carelessly on the table. His lips were parched when he trailed kisses down her neck, hands rough as they wound into hers. Just a single moment of contact. But Gracia could still feel the tingle that raced up through her hands.

Then, he put on his evening jacket and swept out of the door in an overblown hurry. He had ignored the fact he didn't have on his military uniform, or, Gracia thought with a smile, he had simply forgotten.

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Roy slid his hands off of Hughes' hips, feeling the sacred fingers detangle themselves from his hair. A heat was creeping quickly up his cheeks and into his ears, and he knew he was burning red.

"You're blushing," Hughes told him unnecessary, a euphoric grin gracing his features as he zipped up his pants. "Come on, it's just for fun. Nothing serious. You're always so uptight." He pushed his big hands through Roy's locks again, smiling at his friend like he was a puppy. "What, are you afraid one of the other recruits is going to walk in on us?"

"Not at all," Roy smirked up at him and grasped the other man's arm. "Are you?"

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"It's nothing!" Hughes insisted, eyes shining and voice full of fervor. The papers crackled in the fireplace behind him, and Gracia felt herself drawn to the flames. They sifted and rustled, making final efforts to stand tall before crumbling beneath the blaze.

But her husband's hands were quaking around her shoulders, his entire body blocking her as if she was about to do something crazy like walk out in the middle of a gunfight. "Please," he almost stuttered, "please trust me."

"It's not nothing," Gracia told him, but it wasn't an accusation. No, more like a question, a trusting inquiry.

His eyes were far away as they stared over her head; his hands were like a vice tightening around her skin. "If they ask you, then, you'll be able to say you know nothing."

Fear and apprehension thudded into her chest as she watched his eyes dart back and forth, back and forth.

And then he pulled her to his chest, strong arms reaching around her and burying her beneath him. He breathed in deeply, his fingers drawing an unknown pattern on her back. "And Elecia will know less, less than nothing."

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"No," Roy shook his head, feet planted to the floor like they had been glued there. "No. I don't understand." He shivered, jaw tightening and eyes getting wider by the second. "Why did he keep these here?"

"In case the case came up again." Gracia shrugged and shut her eyes, kneading her temple with her fingers. "I don't know. I thought…they were horrible."

Roy slammed the shoebox lid down, his panic brief but fierce. "These are pictures of murders, burnings. Rapes. Good god. There are children with their limbs chopped off in here!"

"He said he didn't trust the military. In what I could get out of him, he said there was too much of a 'pattern' and he should keep all the evidence to himself." She wandered towards the kitchen, remarkably calm despite the fact that pictures of dissected brains lay scattered on her countertop.

"Maes would never—" Roy didn't know what Hughes would never do. Roy didn't even know what was going on.

"Maes did what he had to do. Do you know why he acted like these people weren't real? Like they hadn't suffered?"

Roy stared at her, desperate for some kind of explanation. The bags underneath his eyes made his face look hollow, like he was a wax doll melting underneath unbearable heat.

"Because if he hadn't, he would have seen us in every single one of those pictures." Gracia swept up the brains and the severed limbs, neatly stacking them before returning them to their innocent little shoebox. "And he wouldn't have been able to stand it."

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"It's been six years, Roy. Six years." Gracia shook her head, fingernails digging deep into her purse. "The grave is there. He's buried. We mourned him!"

Roy shuddered despite how rigid his body had become. A board, creaking in the storm. "Mourned properly?" he asked, like a child wanting to be assured that everything was going to be alright.

"Properly. For the right amount of time." She put her hands on his chest with hesitation, fingering the buttons and the patches. They were already so familiar, but then again, so different. "Please, Roy, please stop this. You're scaring me!"

"The right amount of time," Roy repeated, hands obsessively wiping at his pants.

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Roy watched himself kneel at his lieutenant's feet. The cold mud swirled around his knees, sending an icy chill racing though his body. His face was set, he saw, and a jagged slash ran all the way down his cheekbone. Oh. He couldn't remember how that had happened.

Beneath his fingers, the glassy eyes shut one last time. The body quavered, sinking until that once perfect face was lost beneath the sludge.

"Lieutenant, sir."

Roy shut his own eyes, too, as if he was trying to understand how his former superior would act. "Yes, private." He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded, and how blank and tearless his eyes had become.

"We cannot stay here, sir. They are moving east."

A moment of silence hung over the two soldiers, anomalies, members of the living in this field of the dead. "No time for burial. Move out."

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"Well, you," Gracia whispered, her fingers reaching hesitantly out to steer Roy's grim form in her direction. "You ask me on a date all handsome-like and now all you can do is sit here on my couch looking like the world ended and you got left behind."

"This was a mistake," Roy muttered, eyes set on the cushions below. "I'm sorry."

"How so, sir?"

"Look—Maes." Roy skidded his feet along the carpet and produced a squeak. "Maes—Maes loved you, and I—" Roy let out a huff of air. He tried to get her to release him, hands tugging gently at her slender wrists. "Well, I shouldn't be here. I'm not supposed to be here. I—I'm going to go, before this goes any further and I ruin everything."

He stood up hurriedly and wound his scarf around his neck, hiding his mouth underneath the warm wool. In normal circumstances Gracia would have found his bear-like appearance amusing.

"Why? Why should you not be here?"

"You know why!" Roy shoved his hand through his hair and started to turn one way, then the other. His feet shuffled around like he was trying to avoid a spider.

Gracia smiled sadly. "No, no I don't." She twisted her hair around her fingers.

With a frustrated wave of his hand Roy finally found his balance and turned towards her. Despite Roy's attempts at looking presentable, Gracia could see panic written in every disordered piece of clothing. "You know I loved him. Loved him in ways I never should have." His eyes were pleading, soulful, and full of ancient pain. Please understand, please understand.

She stood up and walked over to him, still smiling even though he blinked and tried to avoid her eyes. "Oh Roy Mustang, you can't love somebody the wrong way."

Roy shook his head violently. "I...slept with him. It was wrong to expect anything out of it. He _said_ we were playing around. Then he met you, and I felt like a horrible person for my jealously. I knew it was just a game when it started, and I should have never let it grow—I knew that he wasn't serious." A twitch. A twist of an already untidy tie. A grimace.

"To have loved my husband was not a sin, Roy." Her hands pressed into the deep wool, winding it around her fingers and collecting in her arms.

"But you married Maes. Maes chose you. Maes wanted only you!" The agony in Roy's voice was so poignant she could almost hear it sizzle. "And now I'm afraid I know why." The last part was barely a whisper.

Gracia continued unwrapping her flustered date. "You're not making a good first impression, you silly man. Except for the last part. The last part was kind of cute, now."

"I'm sorry," Roy murmured in his tone of retreat, a shy smile still poking through the gloom. I've lost, he was saying, I've lost and I've got to go back and regroup before I lose my troops.

The assortment of scarves fell from his face and neck, and Gracia patted him on the chest. "A bit better. Now take off that ridiculous military coat. It makes you look like a sick bear."

"A sick bear?"

"A sick bear."

Roy snorted and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. Soon Gracia was laughing with him, a schoolgirlish light shining bright in her eyes.

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Hughes shut his novel, brushing the old bindings with his hand before pushing it to the side. "Is that so," he muttered thoughtfully, "is that so."


End file.
